The unedifying truth is that Joseph Heller, like all the best athletes, needs a manager, a coach. It is common knowledge that he had one (his editor at Knopf) until part-way through Good as Gold, when Heller switched houses. Several New York publishers are owned by hamburger chains; so far as this writer is concerned, Simon and Schuster is simply the House of the Whopper. Is God Knows without jewels? Does a bull have tits? Of course not: the unforgiving genius still flares, and the book is worth the price of admission for the first few pages alone. In at least two senses, though, Heller’s novels simply refuse to get better.
Observer 1984
Newspeak at Vanity Fair
In these days of cultural Balkanisation, one would expect a new American magazine to have a pretty firm fix on its potential market. A journal targeted at the gourmet jogger, say, or a forum for Buddhist computer experts, or simply a David Soul or John Travolta monthly. Encouraged by its recent successes with Gentlemen’s Quarterly (aimed at the foppish young male) and Self (aimed at the careerist young female), Condé Nast is now launching a general-interest magazine aimed — at whom? According to the handouts and brochures, the new magazine is aimed at fickle readers of the New Yorker, Atlantic, Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books. Architectural Digest, Smithsonian and Town and Country are also cited as possible competitors; so are Vogue, GEO and Sports Illustrated. Trying to capitalise on their obvious confusion, the promoters are calling it ‘a “fun” magazine for the very, very highbrow’.
Its name is Vanity Fair and, yes, it is a resuscitaton of the spangled original, the ur-glossy that served cafe society from 1914 to 1936. Vanity Fair in its prequel form is now being cried up as a Parnassus of glamour and distinction. But then all long-lived magazines sound glamorous in precis. Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Colette, Cocteau and Houdini contributed to Vanity Fair. Yet Cosmopolitan and Penthouse will eventually be able to produce an equally impressive backlist. Famous people do tend to work for magazines. We forget that there must have been many issues of Vanity Fair in which the star writer was Philboyd Studge.
Still, the old VF was strong on the visual side too, with its popularisation of European painters and graphic artists, and its photographic features by Edward Steichen and Man Ray. It served a self-conscious elite, and with such glittering insensitivity that the death of the magazine now looks very like a suicide. After the Crash of ‘2.9, and well into the Thirties, VF was all parties and peppermint creams, even as its readership was turning into a pauperised diaspora. It seems only appropriate that in a 193 z photo feature ‘handsome Mr Hitler’ was presented as the personification of ‘Hope’.
The brains, money and expertise behind the new VF are intensely aware of the reasons for the death of its predecessor. In fact, they are intensely aware of everything. The minutes of the VF ‘Sales Call’ — or marketing think-in — are full of beguiling bizspeak. The media-planning director is Doyle Dane Bernbach. Noreen Palardy, associate media director of Kenyon and Eckhardt, Inc., is also at the table. ‘Let’s take a peek. I’ve taken stats of selected pieces… Right now I’d like to turn this over to Joe… Thank you, John__A good question, Jay …’ They are rightly convinced that a jitter-bugging superclass no longer exists; but they firmly believe in the existence of a new elite out there somewhere, and longing to be tapped. These are the ‘meritocrats’, the ‘integrateds’. ‘We’re not aiming for a demographic; we’re aiming for a psychographic,’ stresses VF publisher Joseph E. Corr.
Here is Corr’s vision of the dream couple — from the VF targeting point of view, of course. He is a ‘group product director’, an outdoorsman, a hunter, a pianist with musical tastes ranging ‘from Bach to the B-52s’. She is a market-research director (but who isn’t?), a marathon runner, ‘an accomplished photographer who’s had some things printed’. He and She are, alike, ‘achievers, thinkers’. If such terrifying people exist — and if they have any spare time to read it, or even buy it — then VF is the magazine for them.